10 WAYS TO REVERSE THE AGEING PROCESS

After his Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, people expect Deepak Chopra to dole out lists and ways and tips. He had one ready at the Delhi talk.

1. Change your perception of your physical body. Your body is a field of information and energy. This field is constantly influenced by breathing, eating, digestion, metabolism, elimination, and how we experience the world through our five senses. Also, how we metabolise that through our inner world of thought, feeling, emotion and desire.

2. Change your perception of time. If you can do that, you can accomplish much more—because you are creative, not stressed. You can do a lot more if you can sit back, become non-reactive, and see the world as if for the first time. Lord Shiva, the first yogi, said: "If you want to create a new body, step out of the river of memory and conditioning, and see the world as if for the first time." He said: "I use memory, but I do not allow memory to use me." Now change your perception of time, you have all the time in the world. Time is the movement of consciousness—put your attention on that, it's timeless. And what is timeless? Not the human body, not the human mind, but the soul.

3. Change your perception of ageing itself. To grow old is to be wiser. To grow old is to have more responsibility. To grow old is to change your inner dialogue from 'me, mine' to 'What can I do? How can I help?' And as you change your perception of ageing, your biology will change. Those are the three most important things.

4. Keep active, exercise.

5. Improve mind-body coordination through yoga, breathing techniques, martial arts.

6. Get rid of the toxicity in your life—toxic emotions, relationships, habits.

7. Pay attention to literature—on nutritional supplements, ayurveda and all these great rasayanas, which are some of the great anti-oxidants known that directly affect the ageing process.

8. Learn to be flexible. Vedanta says: "Infinite flexibility is the secret of immortality." Studies show that the primary thing that distinguishes healthy older people from those less healthy, is the ability to be flexible.

9. Make love the most important thing in life. To understand our 'inter-beingness in the inter-isness', to understand love not as a mere emotion or sentiment, but as the ultimate truth at the heart of creation.

10. Be aware of your mortality, because in the awareness of mortality is the glimpse of immortality. Be aware that death is stalking you in every moment of your existence. And once one becomes aware of that, one's life becomes magical. Because now one's priorities are not the same.